HANOVER, N.H. - Context plays a big role in our memories, both good and bad. Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" on the car radio, for example, may remind you of your first love -- or your first speeding ticket. But a Dartmouth- and Princeton-led brain scanning study shows that people can intentionally forget past experiences by changing how they think about the context of those memories.

The findings have a range of potential applications centered on enhancing desired memories, such as developing new educational tools, or diminishing harmful memories, including treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The study appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. A PDF is available on request.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Every hospital's intensive care unit has treated them -- the critically ill patients who spend weeks going from crisis to crisis, never quite getting better enough to get out of the ICU, but never quite dying.

Now, new research shows they really are a different kind of patient -- and that despite their tiny numbers, they're using a vast chunk of healthcare resources.

Just 5 percent of ICU patients account for 33 percent of all days that ICU beds get used, the study shows. The researchers have even given a name to what these patients have: Persistent Critical Illness, or PerCI for short.

A review of six studies that evaluated the effects of meat and vegetarian diets on mortality involving more than 1.5 million people concluded all-cause mortality is higher for those who eat meat, particularly red or processed meat, on a daily basis.

The work by physicians from Mayo Clinic in Arizona published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association helps to affirm claims by the United Nations International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) claim that meat is a carcinogen as dangerous as plutonium or cigarette smoking. Despite variability in the data, they still conclude that increased intake of red meat, especially processed red meat, is associated with increased all-cause mortality.  

It's known as the cocktail-party problem: in the cacophony of sound made by insects in a spring meadow, how does one species recognize its own song?

Insects such as the tree cricket solve this problem by singing and listening at a single unique pitch.

But if that's the case, U of T Scarborough researchers wondered what happens when the temperature changes, because that affects the frequency of the tree cricket's song. The higher the temperature, the higher the pitch.

Putting surgery one step closer into the realm of self-driving cars and intelligent machines, researchers show for the first time that a supervised autonomous robot can successfully perform soft tissue surgery. The robot outperformed expert surgeons and current robot-assisted surgical techniques in open bowel surgery in pigs. By taking human intervention out of the equation, autonomous robots could potentially reduce complications and improve the safety and efficacy of soft tissue surgeries, about 45 million of which are performed in the U.S. each year. Robot-assisted surgery currently relies on the surgeon to manually control it, and outcomes can vary depending on the individual's training and experience.

Vultures are often cartoon-ish characters in parched deserts. No one wants them around because in western films it means they are just waiting for you to die.

Cultural jokes aside, vultures in some parts of the world are in danger of disappearing. And according to a new report from University of Utah biologists, such a loss would have serious consequences for ecosystems and human populations alike. 

Nearly one in three British Columbia women over age 65 received inappropriate levels of prescription medicines in 2013, while only one in four men of the same age did, according to a new paper.

The work analyzed population-based health-care datasets to find out which medical and non-medical factors influence patients' risk of receiving prescription drugs on the American Geriatrics Society's list of drugs that should be avoided for older patients. The biggest non-medical risk factor was an individual's sex.

The authors found that, even when results were adjusted for all other risk factors, women were as much as 23 per cent more likely than men to be prescribed inappropriate drugs.

Photosynthesis, vision, and many other biological processes depend on light, but it’s hard to capture responses of biomolecules to light because they happen almost instantaneously.

Nearly half of glaucoma patients don't take their daily prescription eye drops as prescribed, due to forgetfulness or physical limitations like arthritis. However, missing vital doses of glaucoma medication makes these patients vulnerable to increased vision loss and blindness.

A medicated silicone ring that rests on the surface of the eye reduced eye pressure in glaucoma patients by about 20 percent over six months, potentially benefiting 3 million people in the United States who have glaucoma. Phase 2 clinical trial results on this technology were published today and the results are also being presented today at the Ophthalmology Innovation Summit in New Orleans.  

I had drinks with an old college friend last week. As we reminisced and I caught him up on my job leading the Tropical Ecology Assessment&Monitoring (TEAM) Network, he stopped me mid-sentence.